Got the Jimmy Legs
January 30, 2007 – 2:15 pm

No more wood on the fire

Now that some of the house repairs are beginning to die down (well, actually it's more like outright ignoring), I can get back to other methods of shortening my life through external tasks. Tonight that means wandering around on the cold streets to go see some bands. I've already got my flask of Jim Beam, so the journey shouldn't be too painful.

The show is USAISAMONSTER, one of my favorite bands of the past several years, they're playing at the Glasslands Gallery. I've only been there once before, over the summer at what I think might have been the first show in this incarnation. That was also a USAISAMONSTER show. The trick now is I no longer live on the G train line.

Normally, that wouldn't be considered a handicap, but in terms of getting to this location in Williamsburg it would actually have helped. Used to be I could take the G to the L train to get where I was going (in this case, Kent Ave & S. 2nd St.) but now I live only near the J train. There paradox is that the J stops at Marcy, which is pretty much the only train in all of the South Williamsburg area. But it still leaves me almost a mile from the space. Though the L train drops me off at Bedford and 7th, it's about a half mile to the joint from there. And that's as close as mass transit will take me.

Or so I thought. Thanks to the MTA's Trip Planner (what a catchy name), I see that the Q59 bus will pretty much take me right to the club's front door. But to get to this bus I gotta take the J to Lorimer St, exit and catch the B48 bus first. I dunno if I have it in me to stand around waiting for the bus in this weather (and forget about it when the show is over, there'll be one bus every 6 hours).

Now, I can take the J train down to Broadway Junction and transfer to the L, whipping around the eastern edge of the neighborhood until it hits Bedford. This will take forever, and now that I think of it, also involves standing around outside (both trains are elevated at Broadway Junction). Or I could walk half a mile to the Bushwick Ave L station and take that over. Either way it looks like I'm gonna be out in the cold for much of the night. I better stop, I'm starting to talk myself out of it.

By Jimmy Legs | Posted in Mass Transit, Music, The City | Comments Off on No more wood on the fire
January 24, 2007 – 10:31 am

Your Funeral, My Tile

The Ugly Tile has largely been banished to the hallways and interstitial areas of the house. We have painted, stained and finished 3 floors of the house, more or less. for some reason the 2nd floor is all hardwood, while the 1st and 3rd floors were only partially hardwood (4th floor was 100% Ugly Tile).

So here's what we've been fighting against:

This is the tile that covers more than 50% of our home. It's a mottled, beige-based affair which has been liberally splashed with that lovely orange paint that adorned every bit of molding in the house (still working to cover all that up).

  • What's good about the tile: hides dirt
  • What's bad about it: fugly

I guess it's pretty sturdy stuff (it's really heavy when you pile it up). But it looks bad, it makes everything around it look bad, too. The way we dealt with it varied from floor to floor. In the 1st floor kitchen we ripped up the tile and painted over the plywood (this was sort of the experimental stage, we'd proabbly shoulda left the tile and painted over it). On the 3rd floor we painted the tile, both in the main room and its adjoining hallway, effectivley covering every bit of tile on that floor. On the 4th floor, we ripped up tile and plywood, revealing the pine subfloor below, however we use top of the line tile floor mops to clean our floors. The subfloor was repaired and refinished. There's still tile in the upstairs kitchen, hallway and office, and in the hallway on the 1st floor. But at least it's in the minority now.

Here's some before and after photos of the progress:

BEFORE: This is before we bought the house, you can see not only the tile but also the Evil Orange everywhere.

Here's the primer (note the orange is also gone).

Floor painted.

AFTER: Floor with final finish. I used a satin tone this time, that glossy stuff is too much. Even this stuff looks al ittle too shiny to me. Do they make flat polyurethane?

BEFORE: To reiterate, here's the fireplace on the 3rd floor before we did anything. Why did they paint one panel and not the other?

AFTER: Ah, that's better!

I'll put together some more examples of the other work, if only to give me something to do around the office.

By Jimmy Legs | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Your Funeral, My Tile
January 22, 2007 – 12:11 pm

Work my fingers to the bone


3rd Floor Painted, originally uploaded by Jimmy Legs.

More exciting tales from the Land of Flooring! Fresh on the heels of our 4th floor refinishing, we moved down a floor to deal with the Gross Tile of the third floor. The floor is covered with this ugly institutional type tile, I guess it's linoleum or something like that. It was on the 4th floor too, but Buzz and Sylvia ripped it all up for us to get at the wood underneath. We don't have time for such a project here, so we're just painting the tile. It's amazing how much more tolerable it is already.

Tonight we just have to put the polyurethane down and it'll be finished. Since we chose a really dark brown I've been debating if we can convince people it's a special type of parquet floor, but ultimately we're just shooting for the 'innocuous' look here.

This is the last hugely inconvenient project for a while. We really need to focus on fixing up our apartment in the smaller ways that make a place livable. We still don't have any pictures on the wall, curtains on the windows, or any idea where to put our boxes of crap that don't seem to have anywhere else to go.

Since we're just waiting for the paint to dry now, I had time this weekend to clean up the cellar somewhat. I took out the paneling between the two small rooms, making a room just big enough for band practice. I even hooked up my guitar and played for the first time in 3 months. Jeez, I rusty, but lucky for me, all the work I've been doing on the house seems to have maintained my calluses.

By Jimmy Legs | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Work my fingers to the bone
January 17, 2007 – 11:57 am

Sealed with a kiss

4th Floor Refinished, originally uploaded by Jimmy Legs.

The floors are pretty much done for now! What an exhausting procedure. Considering what we were up against, I think the floors came out well. We're still a couple of Louis Cattorze chairs away from getting added to the House Tour, but we're managing.

For some idea of what we went through between this photo and the one in the preceeding post, check Sylvia's Flickr site.

Oh, and for some reason the servers at work are blocking my ability to post on the comments page, so to electricgreek: yeah the floors are sealed, that's what the whole finishing process is, right? Is there some miracle product that wasn't mentioned in our how-to guides?

By Jimmy Legs | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Sealed with a kiss
January 16, 2007 – 11:14 am

To my tribe that flows in layers

4th Floor Unrefinished, originally uploaded by Jimmy Legs.

I had Friday and Monday off from work. Sounds like a relaxing 4-day weekend! However, the opposite is true, it was a near-constant tumult of rental vans, heavy equipment, runs to the hardware store, and fitful sleep the entire time. Our friend kept saying that refinishing our own floors would be "gratifying" but I didn't start feeling particularly gratified until late last night, when the second coat of polyurethane went on.

We refinished the subfloor in two rooms on the 4th floor. Much of the floor is fairly intact, but a lot was seriously yucky. We got some salvaged floorboards from our friend who's a lot more savvy than us on these things, with which we replaced the worst of them. We rented a drum sander and were told we wouldn't need the heaviest grit (16) since our floors are pine. Again, the opposite is true. Pine though they may be, the floors had many layers of gunk on them, from old adhesive to paint to what may have been stain. It looks like we weren't the first ones to think of using the subfloors for this purpose.

When you read up on floor refinishing, you see these pictures in which a drum sander coasts across a floor, effortlessly removing every bit of finish in one pass. It looks as easy as vacuuming. This was not the case for us, the old finish/paint/gunge didn't want to come up so easily, even with 24-grit sandpaper. It took many a pass to get things cleaned up, plus some nonstandard use of the edger (which came with 20-grit paper and worked like the dickens until the paper ripped at which time it would leave black gouges on everything it touched).

Between the drum floor sander, the edger, the little belt sander and the paint scrapers we eventually got things down to bare wood. It looked pretty good, but due to wide variation in plank quality, as well as all the patching that was necessary, we pretty much had to stain it to conceal some of the shortcomings.

Staining was a lot easier than the previous tasks, and compared to that stuff it's pretty hard to screw up. Then the polyurethane was applied. And it's still not finished. Tonight I gotta caulk up some of the larger gaps between planks. Then we add another coat of polyurethane, and I think that'll be it. God, please let that be it.

By Jimmy Legs | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on To my tribe that flows in layers